Wednesday 6 December 2006

Text someone to tell them that reason has triumphed

Conspiracy theories and irrational fears irritate me, so it is with a sense of enormous joy that I read today that another Frankenstein delusion has been disproved.

An article on the Journal of the National Cancer Institute has conclusively disproved any link between mobile phone use and cancer.

This is no small study. 420,000 people who began using mobile phones between 1982 and 1995 were studied over 22 years; they had on average used their mobile for 8.5 years. The size of the sample enables incredibly accurate prediction. A control sample would have expected 15,001 cases of cancer, but in fact the group had a slightly lower incidence, with 14,249 cases of cancer being recorded.

The report concludes that “We found no evidence for an association between tumor (sic.) risk and cellular telephone use among either short-term or long-term users. Moreover, the narrow confidence intervals provide evidence that any large association of risk of cancer and cellular telephone use can be excluded.”

Perhaps we can at last put this ridiculous fear of science to bed. The future’s bright; the future’s orange!

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